


Hist Whist

by cassyl



Series: A Haunted House [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Ghost Sex, Ghosts, Halloween, M/M, exhibitionism (sort of?)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:15:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassyl/pseuds/cassyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which John adjusts to being a ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hist Whist

**Author's Note:**

> A Halloween sequel to "The Light in the Heart," coming in just under the wire. Happy Halloween!

They had to haunt the train back to London. 

John was getting better at making himself corporeal and discorporeal at will, at becoming solid enough to move things and un-solid enough to walk through walls, but he hadn’t quite mastered the art of visualizing another place and causing himself to simply _be there_. Short distances were all right, and Sherlock insisted he would improve with time, but they both knew London would be too much of a stretch. 

Sherlock was patient with him, though only just. John could see the slowness of this mode this mode of travel was in danger of sending him spare. “Maybe there’s something we could do to pass the time,” John suggested as they drifted between compartments, and Sherlock pulled his head back out of the dining car with a wicked grin. 

It was surprising, really, how much he could still feel when he no longer had a body. While his corpse lay in a morgue somewhere in rural Scotland, John was pressed against a chilly window in an occupied train compartment, being kissed wild.

“What is it you’re kissing, precisely?” John asked, drawing away from Sherlock’s lips for a moment. 

“Shut up,” Sherlock hissed, dipping his head to rake his teeth along John’s neck.

“Because it’s not my mouth, clearly. So—ah!” It took him a moment, after that, to resume his train of thought. “I mean, those aren’t really your—”

“Good God, does it really matter?”

John couldn’t help smiling at Sherlock’s frustration. “Well, it does to me, a bit,” he said. “Not all of us are old hands at being dead.” 

He could feel – literally _feel_ – Sherlock suppress his impatience as he straightened up and steeled himself to give John a lesson in the afterlife.

“It’s memory, mostly,” Sherlock said. “As far as I can tell, anyway.”

“Memory?”

Sherlock inclined his head. “We don’t have needs anymore – no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue – but we can remember.” John recalled sitting in the hotel bar that first night, before he’d realized he’d died, expecting to want a stiff drink to steady his nerves and just . . . not feeling the need. “I once got myself drunk just thinking about some rather good whiskey I’d had while I was alive,” Sherlock said. “Those feelings can even transfer to the living, at least to an extent.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Of course not.” Sherlock frowned, as if there were nothing extraordinary about this suggestion at all. “Haven’t you ever felt a black mood descend on you for no apparent reason, when a moment ago you’d felt fine? Or ever been seized with the urge to laugh about nothing at all, just a random surge of joy or delight?” 

John remembered an afternoon in university when he and a classmate had been caught up with such uncontrollable laughter they’d had to lie down on the floor, and neither of them, later, could even remember what had set them off. “I suppose, but are you saying that’s— _us_?” He said “us” because “ghosts” still felt a little silly on the tongue. Another thing Sherlock assured him he’d get used to.

“It’s absurdly easy for us to cast our sensations, our emotions, onto the living. Most do it without even realizing – the lost soul doesn’t mean to make others suffer, he simply doesn’t know he’s radiating anguish through the entire house. But it can be done purposefully, as well.”

“You mean we could . . . ?” John tipped his head in the direction of the couple reading the paper in the seats across from them.

Sherlock’s eyebrow went up. “We could find out.”

And Sherlock was right – of course. Just by concentrating, John could create the sensation of a full stomach or a pleasant alcoholic buzz, and with a little more effort, he could set himself aflame with pleasure. Even just kissing Sherlock was more intense than any kiss he’d experienced in life – because everything that John felt Sherlock felt, and everything Sherlock felt crashed down on John, too, until they were both vibrating with want and the ceiling light in the compartment shivered on and off. John was vaguely aware of the living couple in the compartment shifting closer to one another, his hand creeping slightly higher on her thigh. 

John thought this trip back to London was going to prove highly educational—before an irradiating wash of Sherlock’s pleasure stopped him thinking at all.

*

In London, John began to understand that there was a whole world he’d never been aware of, an invisible world of the dead that coexisted right on top of his own.

As they left Marylebone station, Sherlock pointed out a tall man in a Victorian greatcoat, pacing in a small leafy park. “Murdered by a jealous lover in 1895,” Sherlock said dispassionately, gesturing like a tour guide. 

The man didn’t seem to notice them – or anything else around him, just went on striding nervously back and forth. If it weren’t for his antiquated clothing, John would never have realized he wasn’t alive. 

“Is he – stuck like that?”

“Not all spirits realize they’re dead at the same rate,” Sherlock explained. “Some come to that conclusion fairly quickly – you did rather well in that regard,” he added proudly, “– while others take longer, or never figure it out at all. If they don’t choose to stay, like you and I did, that’s usually why they remain, because they haven’t figured out they’re dead. Because they’re idiots.”

John pursed his lips at Sherlock’s derisive tone. The man they’d passed didn’t seem like an idiot. He looked like any other man in the middle of a romantic crisis, too preoccupied with worry to see what was right in front of his face. That didn’t seem stupid to John at all.

But Sherlock was already at the next street corner, and John hurried to catch him up. “Where exactly are we going?” he asked.

“Home,” Sherlock said, and the next moment John let out a strangled shout as Sherlock walked right in front of a car—

—which passed through him without stopping. Sherlock didn’t so much as blink.

“That is going to take some getting used to,” he breathed. He supposed he ought to be impressed that he could feel adrenaline coursing through his veins when he no longer had either veins or adrenal glands to speak of.

Sherlock’s smile did very little to soothe John’s nerves. “I always did hate waiting for the light.”

‘Home’, as it turned out, was a cozy little first-story flat filled to the brim with books and old newspapers and, of all things, a skull. 

“This isn’t . . . yours, is it?” John asked warily, peering into the empty eyes of the skull.

“Don’t be absurd,” Sherlock replied, deeply affronted. “My zygomatic arches are much higher than that.”

Sherlock threw himself down onto the sofa as if he had body to throw. John glanced around the flat, waiting for the occupants to present themselves. Or perhaps, he thought, they were out at the moment. He wondered if they knew they were living in a haunted flat. Perhaps all the clutter was some kind of preventative measure, like spilling salt to confound the devil. Perhaps Sherlock had been cursed to sort through old newspapers for all eternity.

“Who lives here, exactly?” John asked, lowering himself cautiously into an armchair in front of the fire. He was proud he didn’t even have to think about it to avoid sliding through the chair, but remained solid, exactly as if he were flesh and blood.

“I do. Well”—Sherlock rolled his eyes—“in a manner of speaking.”

“ _You_ live here.”

“We do,” Sherlock corrected.

“Your landlord doesn’t mind having a—I mean, having you for a tenant?”

“All Mrs. Hudson knows is that she hasn’t had any luck renting the flat out since I died, poor thing, because all the potential tenants who’ve come to look at it have ‘had a bad feeling about the place.’”

John snorted. “You don’t feel the least bit of remorse about that, do you?”

“Where else am I supposed to go?”

John hadn’t given it much thought, but he’d more or less assumed that Sherlock knocked around some moldering tomb in Highgate Cemetery, clanking some chains and judging the tourists come to gawp at celebrity graves.

“Do most, er, people in our situation . . . stay in the places they died?”

“Geographically, functional perimeters vary from manifestation to manifestation.”

“Meaning . . . ?”

“Meaning, some stay,” Sherlock conceded. Then, with a grin, he added, “Others realize there’s more fun to be had elsewhere.”

“Fun, right, of course,” John said, and he was trying to sound stern, but he couldn’t help smiling.

“In any case, it’s not as if she doesn’t get anything out of the arrangement,” Sherlock said, and it took John a moment to realize he was talking about the landlady again.

“Coming from you, Sherlock, that sounds nothing short of ominous.”

Once again Sherlock rolled his eyes. “I’ve frightened off two would-be housebreakers, and I also got rid of a poltergeist in the basement flat.”

“A _what_?”

Sherlock threw up his hands. “It’s as if you’ve never seen a single horror movie!”

It turned out, there were a lot of things John didn’t know about the realm of the supernatural. Ghosts were the spirits of the living, while poltergeists were the psychic remnants of extreme emotions, malevolent impressions left by traumatic events. Ghouls, apparently, were also a real thing, and not just a synonym for ghosts, Sherlock informed him indignantly – apparently, it was offensive to mix them up, as ghouls lived in graveyards and ate the flesh of the dead. 

When John asked whether vampires and werewolves were real, too, Sherlock gave him a look of abject disgust, though he would concede that there might possibly be something behind all the stories about witches and psychics and mediums. “A lot of people like to think they can commune with the dead,” he said imperiously. “Most of it is rubbish – talking boards and séances and all that nonsense. But there do seem to be some people who are more sensitive than others to, shall we way, the strange and unusual. Mrs. Hudson is one, actually – one of the very few I’ve ever encountered who truly has the gift. Not that she recognizes it, as such, but she’s surprisingly perceptive.”

And John quickly discovered this to be true. She would always look up when he entered the room, and sometimes when Sherlock made a noise upstairs, she would scold him as if he were still alive. John found himself wondering whether he could reveal himself to her. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to, he thought—someone other than Sherlock, that was. But what would he say to her if he could? ‘Oh, hullo, I’m the dead boyfriend of your ghost tenant, fancy a cup of tea I can’t drink?’ Everything in that sentence set his teeth on edge.

Luckily, there were other demands on John’s attention. Sherlock did, just as he said, work as a detective. Every day he stole a newspaper from newsagent’s down the street and perused the obituaries looking for new cases, deaths in which there was a good chance the deceased had not moved on for one reason or another – traumatic demise, unfinished business. If there was anything suspicious, they would investigate, and, if Sherlock determined that a soul had not yet passed on, they would help put the dead to rest, if that was what the dead wanted. When that failed, Sherlock fell back on a variety of fringe tabloid publications of the sort that reported alien abductions and a number of paranormal websites. Most of the reports were utter nonsense, but every once in a while some would-be ghost hunter would hit upon a genuine haunting, and John and Sherlock would go and sort it out.

Before John even realized it, autumn had crept up on the city. The leaves had changed color and dropped from the trees and the people were walking down the streets tense-shouldered from a cold John could no longer feel. He had been dead long enough now that it was almost entirely like being alive.

Almost, anyway. He continued to keep more or less normal hours, even though Sherlock pointed out time and time again that they didn’t need sleep. Sometimes he still tried to speak to people – apologizing out of reflex when he walked through someone, smiling at people on the street. It was starting to wear on him a bit, actually, that no one so much as noticed him. He hadn’t realized how much he relied on the subtle acknowledgments of other people when he was alive – passing glances, a nod of thanks for holding a door, even something as simple as someone stepping to the side to move out of his way. 

It was only now dawning on him that he’d elected to spend the rest of eternity entirely invisible to everyone except Sherlock, and while for the most part that thought excited him, sometimes he’d catch himself walking back to places he used to frequent, only to realize that no one from his old life would be able to see him, that nothing could ever be the same.

He knew Sherlock had noticed his growing restlessness. It would have been impossible not to. When Sherlock was angry or annoyed, the emotion radiated off him like heat, and John knew the same was true of his own feelings. There could be no secrets between them, but that didn’t mean they talked about things. Sherlock never mentioned John’s unease, and John didn’t bring it up.

Instead, they helped three souls pass on, followed a will-o-the-wisp all the way through the Forest of Dean, and left the ghost of one particularly cantankerous old woman to tend the rose garden in her cottage for all eternity. On off days, Sherlock amused himself by rearranging the contents of Mrs. Hudson’s cupboards and haunted the archives at New Scotland Yard in hopes of finding a promising cold case. 

Then, one dreary October afternoon, Sherlock said to him, “Halloween tomorrow.”

As far as John was concerned, Halloween was just some American holiday children celebrated by wearing rubber masks and eating too much candy. “OK . . .”

“Honestly, John, _Halloween_.” At John’s shrug, Sherlock let out a disgusted huff. “All Hallows’ Eve? Samhain?”

“Excuse me for not being up on all the major spook holidays,” John snapped. “Next you’ll be cross at me for forgetting Ghost Boxing Day.”

Sherlock’s sneer solidified. “Only as much I’d expect of someone who can’t even call himself a ghost without cringing.”

“I’m doing the best I can! But some of us idiots have a hard time adjusting to being bloody dead, all right! We can’t all have as easy a time of it as you.”

Sherlock’s expression went livid, and John felt a lance of intense feeling coming from the other man. He took it at first to be anger—only, it wasn’t anger at all, but something sharp and self-recriminating, almost like remorse. Before John could pin it down any further, Sherlock had disappeared, leaving him alone in the flat to wonder what he’d said to hurt Sherlock’s feelings.

“Typical,” John muttered to the empty room. He kicked at the leg of the ottoman. Unfortunately, John was too angry to get any satisfaction from the way it jerks across the floor and banked up against the sofa. 

Loathe to stay in the flat and wait for Sherlock to return, John left Baker St. and let himself wander. He kept walking, with no care for where he was headed. When he found himself amongst the ivy and granite of Highgate Cemetery, he wasn’t sure whether he’d walked all the way there or simply willed himself to arrive. What leaves remained on the trees were bright gold against the dull sky, and he drifted between strolling couples and tour groups, who passed by him without so much as a shiver of apprehension.

When he was still alive, John had never much believed in the afterlife – not heaven or hell, and certainly not this. He’d always assumed that death would be the end, full stop. There had been times after he returned from Afghanistan, in fact, when that thought had been a source of comfort. He’d been so alone then that it was a relief to think that, at any time, he could simply stop existing.

But John had not stopped existing – and, perhaps the only thing more surprising was that he was not alone.

And then, abruptly, he was elsewhere. He found himself standing in the sitting room at Baker St, and it took a moment to realize he had willed himself to come here. It was, he thought, the farthest he’d ever come that way.

Sherlock playing his violin at the window, but he stilled his bow the moment he noticed John in the room.

“You can always go,” Sherlock said, and though his voice was quiet, it was not precisely gentle.

“Go?”

“I never asked you to stay.”

Sherlock meant John should pass on, or move on—whatever it was souls did when they departed for good. The suggestion chilled him, and he hoped Sherlock felt that. “You didn’t have to ask, Sherlock. I’ve never wanted to go.”

“But you aren’t happy like this.” 

John noticed for the first time how tight and straight the line of Sherlock’s shoulder had become. “I’m not unhappy,” he countered weakly. “I’m just—I’m out of my depth here. I know I’m doing a terrible job of it, but I am trying. You make everything look so easy.”

Sherlock’s head dipped slightly. “It wasn’t, you know.”

“Wasn’t . . . ?”

“Easy for me.” At John’s silence, he laughed softly. “You don’t believe me.”

“I believe you’re an exceptional case.”

“For a long time,” Sherlock said quietly, “I assumed there was a hell and I was in it.”

“I don’t—” 

Sherlock turned to face him then, his expression mild but somehow mournful, and John felt a pale wash of that same sensation he’d felt earlier, less intense this time but no less anguished. “An eternity in which I could never make myself heard? What good is it to be this brilliant if nobody would ever know?” John thought of the way Sherlock’s expression that first day at the hotel, how pleased he’d seemed when John expressed his admiration. “I got used to it, obviously,” Sherlock went on quickly. “I managed to find ways to make myself known, even if no one ever realized it. I found work to occupy myself with, helping other spirits move on, but it was never easy, not until—” Here, his lips twitched. “Well.”

“I never thought—”

“No,” Sherlock said shortly, regaining some of his composure. “You didn’t.”

“I—”

“Did you know,” Sherlock said, cutting off any apology John might have wanted to make, “that Halloween is the when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead is at its thinnest?”

John couldn’t help smiling. “I didn’t.”

“It’s the one night of the year when the dead have any hope of contacting the living.”

Only Sherlock could make being a know-it-all into a peace offering. “I guess I have some learning to do.”

*

The following evening, John found himself standing, unseen, in Harry’s living room. She was on her second bottle of wine as she sorted through a cardboard box filled with what he recognized as his own belongings.

When he was alive, they would have rowed about this, but now it only pained him to see her like this and be able to offer her no comfort. What it hurt, exactly, he wasn’t quite sure, but Sherlock had said that a ghost’s sensations were all memory, anyway, and there was perhaps no one else with whom he had quite so many memories.

He didn’t choose to die. He didn’t choose to leave Harry behind. He didn’t regret that it had happened, but that didn’t mean he could put his life behind him without a second thought. It would take time to adjust.

“I’m willing to wait.” Sherlock’s voice came from behind him, and John turned to see Sherlock standing there, tentatively translucent, as if he were waiting for John’s say-so to fully materialize.

“How did you find me?” John asked.

Sherlock glanced sideways. “I think I could find you anywhere.”

John nodded. When he’d returned to Baker St yesterday, it hadn’t been the flat that drew him back, but Sherlock himself. Wherever they were, however far away, however strange the circumstances, they would always find one another. 

“We still have a few more hours of Halloween left,” Sherlock said. “Fancy doing a little haunting?” 

“It would be good practice,” John conceded, smiling. “We could cut some holes in some sheets, rattle some chains?”

Sherlock’s grin was wonderfully sharp as they drifted into the endless, dark October night. “Oh, John, you have so much to learn.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from E.E. Cummings' delightful poem "[hist whist](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239196)". A million points to anyone who catches all the _Beetlejuice_ references in here, and many, many thanks to all the kind, enthusiastic readers of "The Light in the Heart," without whom I would not have written this. Hope you've all had wonderfully spooky Halloweens!


End file.
